Protocols

What do we expect of you?

Participation - What you get out of the course is directly proportional to what you put into it, including doing assignments, attendance, e-mail, discussion postings, and computer conferencing.
Interaction - Got an opinion? Express it. You want your students to think? Provoke them. Disagree with a proposed course convention? Say so - in the conference. Learning online should not be passive.
Open Mind - Some of the techniques promoted for teaching online may be new to you and therefore seem unconventional. Also, you are in a class with faculty from different colleges and disciplines. Learn from the cultural differences! Always keep asking, what characteristics make learners learn, no matter what discipline or context?
Patience - Don't expect technology to be 100% reliable. When problems arise, stay calm and call for help. This course will help you identify and prevent future problems.
Sense of Humor - Hopefully, when you discover a silly mistake, it won't be a web page you presented at a national conference or e-mail message sent to 100 students. Humor covers many mistakes. Typically, students appreciate an instructor who can laugh at their own mistakes and laughing is very good therapy.
Spirit of Collaboration - Face It! You don't have time to teach online, produce high quality materials, and interact well with students. Learn from your peers who have leveraged their strengths with those who have greater knowledge and experience. They did it collaboratively! We are all in this together.
Learn Our Process - Teaching online should not require you to know HTML. You have better things to do with your time such as creating your course material and interacting with your students. Challenge CD&WS with unique ideas for your course.

What can you expect from us?

Answers - Good answers to all questions, even the hard ones.
Service - We are here to make things happen for you and your students. However, remember we serve a large community and you may have to take a number during peak production periods.
Quality - We want to meet or exceed your expectations.
Follow College Priorities - We listen to what the Deans have told Academic Affairs and follow their priorities. Therefore, make sure your ideas are known to those who can help - your department chair, college distributed learning coordinator and dean.
Humor - Even through computer crashes, server failures, user-errors, software gremlins, hardware demons, unrealistic deadlines and insufficient budgets, we can always find something optimistic and funny to console ourselves. Humor is the best coping strategy for constant deadlines with faculty and technology. Try it! It works!

E-Mail Protocols

Be sure and check your e-mail at least twice per week.
Use e-mail to send a general question about the course to your facilitator only after you have posted the question in the discussion area and waited at least 24 hours for a response.
E-mail addresses for the facilitator and other participants are available in eCommunity.
When sending e-mail to your facilitator about the class, always put "ADL5000" (without the quotes) in the "Subject" line.
Be courteous and considerate. It is important to be honest and to express yourself freely but being considerate of others online is just as important as in the classroom.
Be as clear as possible. Online communication lacks the nonverbal cues that fill in much of the meaning during face-to-face communication. (Using emoticons and other phatic communication strategies can help.)
Do the following in every e-mail message you send during this course:
- Sign your e-mail messages
- Do not use all caps. This makes the message very hard to read and is considered "shouting."
- Check spelling, grammar, and punctuation (You may choose to compose in a word processor, then cut and paste the message into the discussions or e-mail).
- Break up large blocks of text into paragraphs and use a space between paragraphs.
Never assume your e-mail can be read only by yourself; others may be able to read or access your mail.
Never send or keep anything you would not mind seeing on the evening news.

Discussion Protocols

Be courteous and considerate. It is important to be honest and to express yourself freely but being considerate of others online is just as important as in the classroom.
During an online discussion assignment, check the discussion area multiple times.
Make every effort to be clear. Online communication lacks the nonverbal cues that fill in much of the meaning in face-to-face communication. (Using emoticons and other phatic communication strategies can help.)
If you want to send a message to the instructor or to another student, use e-mail rather than the discussions.
Use the appropriate discussion topic; don't post all your comments in the same discussion topic.
Use the following conventions when composing a discussion posting:
- Be careful about "Subject" headings; be descriptive, refer to a particular assignment or previous discussion posting when applicable. Some assignments will specify the subject heading.
- Use the "Reply" or "Quote" button rather than the "Compose" button if you are replying to someone else's posting. ("Quote" is preferable because it includes the original message for context. The original message can be edited to create a shorter excerpt.)
- Avoid postings such as "I agree," "I don't know either," "who cares," or "ditto." They do not add to the discussion, take up space on the discussion topics, and will not be counted for credit.
- Do not use all caps. This makes the message very hard to read and is considered "shouting."
- Check spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
- Try to avoid posting large blocks of text but when you must, break them into paragraphs and use a space between paragraphs. (If you choose to prepare your message in a word processor, add an extra paragraph break in order to avoid inadvertently creating a block of text when copying/pasting into a discussion posting.)
- Use the "Preview" button to see what your discussion posting will look like to others before clicking "Post."